President Vladimir Putin once again surprised everyone by using his annual address to a joint session of both houses of parliament to announce constitutional changes, a government reshuffle and the ouster of his long-time loyal subordinate, Dmitry Medvedev (54). The dismissed prime minister has been... MORE

At the end of last year, the conference “Russia-2024: Left Turn or National Disaster?” was held in Moscow. One of its organizers, a Russian opposition politician known for his radical-left views, Sergei Udaltsov, called the forum “a landmark event in the consolidation of left-patriotic forces”... MORE

Russia’s minister of defense, Army General Sergei Shoigu, used his annual address to the Defense Ministry Collegium, on December 24, to detail the advances in the country’s Armed Forces in 2019. In his speech, he blamed the current poor state of relations between Russia and... MORE

The top stories on Belarus from the past year collectively tended to feature four major interrelated refrains, listed in descending order of frequency: relations with Russia; the national character, including national identity, collective memory, and a growing sense of the need to defend Belarusian sovereignty;... MORE

The five non-Russian republics in the eastern half of the North Caucasus—Chechnya, Ingushetia, Dagestan, North Ossetia and Kalmykia—have enough in common that they deserve to be treated as a region distinct not only from the rest of the North Caucasus but also from areas to... MORE

In his annual press conference, summing up the year just past (Kremlin.ru, December 19, 2019), Russian President Vladimir Putin questioned Ukraine’s title to the territory that Russian nationalists reference as Novorossiya; and he cast an irredentist glance at central Ukraine as well. Putin himself had... MORE

The Moldovan government, controlled by pro-Russian President Igor Dodon, is starting the new year with major economic concerns. A key agenda for officials is to ensure Dodon’s victory in the presidential elections, to be conducted at the end of 2020. To achieve this goal, the... MORE

Russia is easing into 2020 under expectations of continued economic stagnation and deeper political limbo. And yet, over the previous 12 months, Russia’s foreign policy behavior was rather cautious and passive, as if President Vladimir Putin assumed that global drivers were working in his favor,... MORE

The Second Central Asian Leaders’ Consultative Summit—involving the five Central Asian countries of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan—was supposed to take place during the Navruz holiday (March), in the Uzbekistani capital of Tashkent; but it ended up being postponed several times due ostensibly to... MORE

The Russia-led Collective Security Treaty Organization’s (CSTO) political-executive body, the Collective Security Council, held a session on November 27–28, in Bishkek, at which Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan declared that member states “must leave orders of [the] Azerbaijani side to acquire new weapons unanswered” (Aysor.am,... MORE